Introduction on Wordpress - Part 5

Go Back - Introduction on Wordpress - Part 4

Organising content with categories and tags

Moving on down the page from the title, tagline and header image we arrive at the home of the most important part of any website, the content. Without this the website would have no reason for existing and, as such, it is vital content is organized efficiently and displayed optimally.

Let’s look at the “Hello World!” post and apply a category and a tag to it. Find the post by clicking on Posts on the left hand menu and (for now it should be the only entry in the list), hover over the title and an Edit link appears. Click this to navigate to the edit post page. There are several panels here, and we looked at them briefly in the few post. But here we are interested in the areas highlighted in red and blue.

BLUE – The categories panel.

RED – The tags panel.

In above you can see that we have added a new category called “Example Category” and a tag named “Example Tag”. Once these are added we need to click Update in the top right panel for the changes to take effect. The result can be seen below.

You will notice that there are now two hyperlinks underneath the post content, one for the category and one for the tag. These links will direct you to an “archive page” for all posts that fall within that category, or for all posts which have been tagged with that particular tag. For now these pages will of course contain just the one entry, but as you add more posts to the site this facility will become a very useful way to organize information.

Adding a category link to the navigation menu Over time, you may want to make a category archive page easily accessible to your site users. One way of doing this would be to add a link to the theme’s navigation menu, and it is easily achieved within the default Twenty Eleven theme. In the admin area, navigate to “Appearance”, and then “Menus”.

Create a menu entry with a new name. In this case just call it “Navigation”. Once the page has reloaded you will notice that the panels on the left hand side of the page are now active, and you are able to add pages and categories. Add the “Sample Page” and the “Example Category”, and then click Save Menu. Finally, from the top left panel “Theme Locations” select “Navigation” for the Primary Menu dropdown, and click Save there. Visit your site to see the changes.

Read Next - Introduction on Wordpress - Part 6